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jowrose

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Everything posted by jowrose

  1. What's the difference? Just units of measurement?
  2. What's ironic is that this guy is that teachers "teacher's assistant." Needless to say, I don't think he is anymore... It's an interesting scenario. If this kid had any brains (which he doesn't), he'd take the school district to court. I hope he doesn't, that would be a bad thing for this town...
  3. Ok, I'm trying to figure out the volume of one mole of HCl in muriatic acid, but I don't know how they measure the HCl content. The bottle says 31.45% HCl, but what is this in relation to? Does this mean that 31.45% of the mass of the muriatic acid is HCl, or that 31.45 particles out of every 100 particles in the bottle are HCl?
  4. Why is the O2 not produced? Does it immediately oxidize the electrode? Because the H2 can't come from nowhere...
  5. I wasn't sure where to post this, maybe it belongs in General Discussion. Oh well. A couple of weeks ago, a kid at my high school posted on his MySpace website a statement about his desire to have sex with one of his teachers. The school administration caught wind of this, and suspended the student for a week. Do they have the right to do this? I'm not defending the guy, he's a jerk, but isn't this out of their jurisdiction? Or would they be able to argue that his actions were disrupting the learning of other students?
  6. mmmm chlorine. Ok, I'm a little confused about the whole electrolysis reaction. You can electrolize water, and you get hydrogen and oxygen (add a spark for fun). But when you add NaCl to the solution, do you get H2, O2, and Cl2 gases? and then the sodium by itself?
  7. I tried using the purest sample of iron I have; the iron from a thermite reaction. I always try and save the little "nuggets" of iron that form amongst the crumby aluminum oxide, and I figured those would be the best to use in an experiment (they're a little rusty, but that shouldn't matter). So I took two test tubes, put a few grams (I don't have an accurate scale yet, but it's in the mail ) of the iron in them, and filled them halfway with HCl. I come back a few hours later, the solutions are yellow (almost urine -yellow) and there is a large mass of the brown precipitate at the bottom, exactly as in the steel wool. What is this precicipitate?! I need to get some really pure iron. This is driving me nuts.
  8. I tried taking a few grams of the green solid and putting it in a test tube with water. It remained a light green/yellow color, so I added some HCl, and the color remained pretty much the same. I am going to search around for a pure source of iron, this reaction interests me more and more. I do have a purer (I hope) solution of iron chloride in the dessicating box. I used steel nails instead of steel wool; hopefully there was less excess stuff in the nails.
  9. I tried electrolysing copper, and all I got was a big mass of brown sludge. Is it copper oxide then? My whole goal is to make copper chloride, so I don't really care what compound I get as long as it will react with hydrochloric acid. I mixed this unknown gunk with HCl, and lo and behold I get an almost pumpkin-colored solution. Not quite the color I want... What am I doing wrong?
  10. As I left the green solution overnight, i think there must have been steel wool still undergoing a reaction. Yeah, it must be horribly impure. But what's odd is that when i boiled down the precicipitate, I got a solid of almost identical color and texture. I am confused. I have tried doing the experiment with steel nails, and the resulting solutions are much more yellow (so I'm assuming it's far more pure than the steel wool) but I still get the orange color from oxidation. Right now I have maybe 30 mL of this "nail-obtained" FeCl3 sitting in a dessicating box thing (with some calcium chloride dessicant). It's been there about a week, I don't know how much longer it will take.
  11. when you're doing what? you're not mixing it with gasoline are you?
  12. I think rakuenso has been reading the anarchist's cookbook. A great source, if you feel like blowing off a few fingers.
  13. If you're talking about ordering online, I'm not sure whether it's reliable or not as I have never tried. But as far as purchases directly from the store, I've been very satisfied. Good products at bargain-basement prices. I bought 50 or so test tubes (pretty good sized, hold about 20 mL) for 4 bucks. Virtually all my chemistry supplies have come from the store.
  14. I tried making sodium a few weeks ago, but I'm not sure whether I succeeded or not. I put several grams of table salt in a crucible, melted the sodium chloride to a liquid, and then put in my electrical cable with the two electrodes. The electricity I used was taken from a DC converter that was outputting 12 volts (I think). I couldn't visibly notice any gas being released, so after about a minute I turned off the electricity. To determine whether I had made a minute amount of sodium or not, I waited for a few minutes for the crucible to cool and added water to the concoction. One of the electrodes began to bubble, stopping after maybe 30 seconds. Perhaps that was sodium, perhaps not. Either way, making the stuff in large quantities (even a gram) would be extremely difficult for a home chemist.
  15. Ok, I just tried boiling down some of the grey precipitate from the first picture (the iron-HCl reaction). I got the exact same product as my light green solid; but this time there was no intermediary yellow solid. Instead of turning into a brown mush and slowly turning yellow, it turned to yellow and then the pale light green. What is this final product? Is it a different hydrate of iron chloride? Or a different compound altogether? For that matter, what is the precicipitate of the steel wool reaction?
  16. I've been messing around with metals in HCl (mainly because HCl is the only acid I have right now...) and one of my endeavors has been to create a solid form of Iron Chloride. So here's what I did: First I took some steel wool and put it in a beaker of ~30% HCl. Immediately after placing the metal in the solution, there was bubbling and it began to turn a greenish hue. After leaving it outside (I don't like the fumes) overnight, it looked like this: So I removed the liquid (leaving the black gunk (which I guess is just the carbon from the steel wool) and the grey precipitate) and placed it in a reagent bottle. After a day or so it had changed to a yellow-brown color. After obtaining this solution, I tried to create a solid by evaporating off the water. I put some solution in a 100 mL beaker, put it on a hot plate, and kept the temperature just below boiling point. As the water evaporated, yellow crystals began to form around the water line of the beaker. Eventually, I was left with a brown paste at the bottom, and I removed the beaker from the hot plate. As I stirred this brown paste, it turned a bright yellow color and became much finer particles. This solid is, I'm assuming, iron chloride hexahydrate. I'm basing this assumption solely off the fact that my solid almost exactly like pictures of pure iron chloride hexahydrate I've seen. So I put some of this product in a test tube, sealed it with a stopper, and left it overnight. When I came back, the solid had turned a light pale green color.
  17. I live 15 minutes from the actual location. It's my favorite store, I'm thinking about applying for a job if ever have enough time to work.
  18. Yeah, that looks like good stuff. Sacrifice some concentration for purity, so it's kind of an even trade-off. hopefully i'll get my hands on some this weekend.
  19. I know it isn't mixed in with the iron chloride, that's what i mean; that it absorbs water and facilitates the slower process of just letting the water evaporate. But you're right it's not a chemical catalyst.
  20. right next to anothe fun acid as well... does anyone know what impurities in drain cleaner make it brown? are those liable to affect experiments? is the battery acid just h2so4 and water? or are there impurities in there too? sorry for all the questions, thanks for all the responses everyone.
  21. You can reuse the CaCl2, right? Because it simply acts as a catalyst of sorts?
  22. Well, part of the fun of chemistry is observing cool reactions. But when one goes beyond a reasonable limit (aka making C4 from bleach, etc) things start to get called in to discussion...
  23. yeah, I've used copper nitrate tri-hydrate (i think that's how you say it) in chemistry class, it does have a really nice color. How would I go about making iron (III) chloride something-hydrate? wait for evaporation of all the water, by spreading out on a thin sheet or something?
  24. good point, no more explosives talk. by the way, what's a k3wl? i don't speek l33t.
  25. hahaha that's awesome. How do you make that stuff? sounds fun.
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